By David Harsanyi
Thursday, February 09, 2017
First of all, despite the martyr act, no one has the
power to “silence” Sen. Elizabeth Warren — and that’s a good thing. On the
other hand, the impulse to silence Warren is completely rational, and it has
nothing to do with her gender, ancestry, or ideology. It has everything to do
with her sanctimonious lecturing, habitual dishonesty, and disregard of
“norms.” She’s been a bully her
entire career.
But when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pulled
Rule 19, which prohibits all members from taking to the floor and “directly or
indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators
any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator,” I assumed it was a
failure in the optics department. (Not to mention an arbitrary,
speech-inhibiting rule that should not be used, but that’s another story.)
Shutting down a female senator while she’s reading a
letter from civil rights icon Coretta Scott King is a bit on the nose, even for
the GOP. “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she
persisted,” McConnell mansplained. The incident was transformed into Twitter
hashtags #LetLizSpeak and the less catchy #ShePersisted. Both went viral,
instilling millions of Democrats with a new sense of purpose. Hashtags >
voting.
It seemed pretty obvious to me that the nomination of
Jeff Sessions as attorney general was likely a done deal. So it was unlikely
any persuadable voter would have even heard about Warren’s grandstanding if it
weren’t for the kerfuffle. If it were up to me, however, I’d let Warren speak
whenever she wanted to — ceding my time, if necessary — for as long as she
wanted on any stage she demanded. The more she speaks, the better for
conservatives.
As The Washington
Post points out, however, McConnell probably gave Warren’s 2020
presidential aspirations a huge “in-kind contribution” by forcing her to follow
rules of decorum. It’s possible, I suppose, that the GOP is playing the same 3D
chess mastered by Donald Trump. Maybe shutting down Warren was a surreptitious
means of making her the de facto
voice of the Democratic Party and #TheResistance (formerly known as
“unprecedented obstructionism”). Maybe it was just good luck.
Warren as the voice of the Left might be the best-case
scenario for Republicans. For one thing, Warren is no Barack Obama on the
charisma front. For another, Warren saves conservatives the trouble of going
after socialist strawmen. They’ll have a real one.
Still, there’s one potential hitch in the plan.
Republicans, like everyone else, tend to assume politicians they loathe will be
equally loathed by most of the electorate. Be cautious of what you ask for.
You’ll no doubt remember how many liberal pundits acted like the prospect of Marco
Rubio or Ted Cruz as president was scarier than Trump when they thought the
latter had no chance in a general.
The real question is would Warren’s left-populism play on
the electoral map Trump has rejiggered? Is her protectionist trade rhetoric
enough to win over white-working class voters in Pennsylvania coal country even
though she rails against fossil fuels and cheap energy? Would a lawyer who
built a political career growing bureaucracies and pushing regulatory burdens
on Americans be popular with rural workers in Ohio? Is it possible that someone
who believes Obamacare didn’t exert enough government control over the
health-care system going to run strong in a general election campaign in
suburban Indiana? Moreover, can a Northeasterner with extreme social views
bring working-class Missourians home to Democrats? Liberals from Massachusetts,
after all, are still 0-3 over the past 50 years. And Warren is farther Left
than any of them, by a mile.
I use a lot of question marks in the above paragraph
because 2016 taught me that the American electorate is volatile and angry, and
coastal elites should never make assumptions about its temperament. Still, it’s
fair to say at this point — and a lot can change under Trump’s leadership — the
answer to most of these questions seems to be “Unlikely.”
The fuss over “silencing” Warren also reminds us that
Democrats will, like they did with Hillary Clinton, rely heavily on the
identity politics that have failed them for six years, if not longer. CNN, for
example says, “For Elizabeth Warren’s supporters, the vote leading to
#LetLizSpeak was a textbook case of males silencing a woman.” Then there is
this from Kamala Harris, a rising star on the Left:
Women suffer indignity, violence, poverty, and death at
the hands of theocrats around the world every day, but Harris believes that the
Senate leader asking a woman to follow the rules of decorum is a rallying cry
for justice. The fact that Democrats spent the day aiming most of their ire at
Betsy DeVos, who now runs perhaps the least consequential department in the
cabinet, speaks to their hypocrisy.
Then again, few things are more unintellectual,
irrational, or un-American than demanding people comport their political
worldviews to their skin color, sex, or ethnicity. And if a Warren candidacy —
or anyone else’s — ensures that Democrats will spend another four years
accusing half the country of being moral troglodytes while waiting for
demographics to win them elections, Republicans should support their efforts.
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